Bombshell (2019) - Toxic US culture laid bare in Roach's great drama

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+ Best True Story Movie of the Year

Three of the world's best actresses as blond bombshells on the poster for Jay Roach's Bombshell

Fox News is the top cable news channel in the US under CEO Roger Ailes, but as a female anchor gets fired, and a new associate producer meets the sinister office culture under Ailes of sexual favors in exchange for a career there, - that vicious culture is finally about to meet its end.

Bombshell is a fascinating true-story drama written by Charles Randolph (The Interpreter (2005)) and directed by great New-Mexican filmmaker Jay Roach (Zoo Radio (1990)).
The challenge here has clearly been considerable: Make a compelling, entertaining and feasibly structured movie about a decade-long culture of sexual harassment and the downfall of Ailes. Along the way the film succeeds in painting a candid portrait of the very particular workplace that is cable network Fox News, as well as, inevitably, president Trump and his transgressive 'loose-cannon' style as his 2016 election campaign is part of the story. Bombshell succeeds impressively; it accepts that Fox News is not a normal workplace and embraces the sensational aspect of the story; sexy people on TV that were bullied and intimidated. But the Trump mania as well as the settlements that conclude the scandal, (eventually Fox paid Ailes and disgraced anchor Bill O'Reilly more severance money than they did the scores of women that were victimized by them), raise the story to something that points to a toxic climate on a national cultural level. Toxic media-fueled bullying and the lack of a common decency base disintegrates the US. - That could be a radical take from the also acerbically funny Bombshell.
The cast is littered with talent: Charlize Theron (Tully (2018)) is transformed by hair, makeup and prosthetics into Megyn Kelly, who especially gets the ball rolling against Ailes. Nicole Kidman (BMX Bandits (1983)) is a force of thunder as Gretchen Carlson. Margot Robbie (Z for Zachariah (2015)) is terrific as the young associate producer, the fictional composite character that is our closest look into the actual misdeeds that Ailes committed against staff and young women at 'casting' meetings. We never see the deeds, - but we get the picture and degradation it means for the women. The paranoid office tension of a fear culture is palpable, and the women come together memorably in a few elevator scenes. John Lithgow (The Pelican Brief (1993)) is great as Ailes, who isn't a monster here but a man who is powerful and held unaccountable for many many years. The cast also has terrific capacities like Connie Britton (Women in Trouble (2009)), Kate McKinnon (Ted 2 (2015)), Malcolm McDowell (Zombex (2013)), Mark Duplass (The Puffy Chair (2005)), Allison Janney (A Thousand Words (2012)), Richard Kind (Fancypants (2011)) and Robin Weigert (The Sessions (2012)).
Bombshell is snappy and thought-provoking, simultaneously entertaining and depressing like a glittery magazine. It calls Adam McKay's brilliant masterpiece The Big Short (2015) to mind, which Randolph co-wrote, without Bombshell reaching the heights felt in that film. It is a still a great piece of filmmaking.

Related posts:

Jay Roach: 2019 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

Trumbo (2015) - Good actors and a thrilling true story make this biopic work 
Dinner for Schmucks/Dinner with Schmucks (2010) - Carell carries Roach's flawed but utterly hilarious comedy 

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 32 mil. $
Box office: 59.6 mil. $ and counting
= Big flop (has grossed 1.86 times its cost to date)
[Bombshell opened 13 December (USA) and runs 108 minutes. Development of the film was announced shortly after Ailes' death in May 2017. Shooting took place in Los Angeles, California from October 2018- ?. The film opened #19 to a 319k $ first weekend in 4 theaters in North America, where it peaked at #6 and has grossed 31.7 mil. $ (53.2 % of the total gross). The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets are Australia with 4.8 mil. $ (13.4 %) and the UK with 2.9 mil. $ (4.9 %). The film's release has been upset by the corona-virus pandemic. The film was nominated for 3 Oscars: It won for Best Makeup and Hairstyling and lost Best Actress (Theron) to Renée Zellweger in Judy and Supporting Actress (Robbie) to Laura Dern in Marriage Story. It was also nominated for 2 Golden Globes, won 1/2 BAFTA nominations and several other honors. Roach hasn't announced his next project yet. Theron returns in The Old Guard (2020, VOD); Kidman in The Undoing (2020, TV-series) and theatrically in The Prom (2020); and Robbie in Megan Thee Stallion & Normani's Diamonds (2020) music video and theatrically in Birds of Prey (2020). Bombshell is fresh at 70 % with a 6.73/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Bombshell?

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood/Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019) - Tarantino gets lost in Hollywood

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+ Most Overrated Movie of the Year 

Major stars and exotic, palm tree-laced Hollywood lures from this irresistible poster for Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

  
Hollywood, 1969: Western TV-show veteran Rick Dalton is an alcoholic struggling to stay relevant, and with the help of his loyal stuntman friend Cliff, he takes up an Italian venture, while new neighbors come with trouble...

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is actually the 11th feature from Tennessean master writer/director Quentin Tarantino (My Best Friend's Birthday (1987)), - although it is marketed as his 9th), perhaps because he has stipulated that he will only make 10, and that he isn't quite done yet. (It can come to 9 if you don't count his first, little-seen debut My Best Friend's Birthday and also count his Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 as one film, which is obviously untrue.)
The film arrives with high hopes, not least because it teams up two of the world's biggest stars; Leonardo DiCaprio (Gangs of New York (2002)), who previously starred in Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), and Brad Pitt (Johnny Suede (1991)), who joins a Tarantino film for the first time here. But also because it is a Hollywood-themed movie, which seems appropriate for self-professed movie maniac and pop culture reference artist par excellence Tarantino.
And yet Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a massive disappointment.
The film entertains, - and anything less would have been wildly scandalous, - but it does so leaving a bitter aftertaste, before it ends in a climax that is ludicrous to put it mildly.
While Tarantino's style and humor was refreshing early in his career, - especially so in the uninhibited and brilliant Pulp Fiction (1994), - it is here stale and old-fashioned: Some of the film's comedy is witnessing DiCaprio's pathetic protagonist describe Mexican girls as 'chili peppers' and 'hot tamales'; another rests on Pitt's character having murdered his wife and gotten away with it. This doesn't mean that the film reveals a misogynistic or racist filmmaker, necessarily, but there's so much more of it: A fetishized child actor (played by 10 year-old Julia Butters (13 Hours (2016))), martial arts legend Bruce Lee getting slanderously poured down the drain in another scene that depicts him as a ridiculous, whimsical braggadocio; and then there's the film's third and last starring actor, Margot Robbie (About Time (2013)), who is treated to a third 'lead' part here (portraying ill-fated actress Sharon Tate) that involves her just being wonderful, pregnant, and not speaking.
Tarantino has been criticized for at least two of these things, and this film is one case where such criticism actually hits a sore point. Because this under-use of Robbie's talents is peculiar.
The film has no central narrative; it consists mostly of Dalton and Cliff's moseying around Hollywood (and Rome); and it is long. Pitt is what works best in it as the laid back, manly Cliff. SPOILER One scene has him pick up an underage girl hitchhiker, who brazenly asks him for sex in the car minutes later. The scene seems a clear reference to Sharon Tate's husband, master filmmaker Roman Polanski's later felony of engaging in sex with a 13 year-old girl in Los Angeles, which gave him a short prison sentence, and whose further consequences led him to flee the US for Europe. The scene has Pitt admirably adamant in his refusing the girl's advances; yet she is also so natural, alluring and forwardly sexual that it implicitly seems to inject that underage girls are also sometimes really after an older man sexually. (But as the Polanski case was a 13 year-old, and this 'girl' here is just about a woman, it shows a mature response while visually condoning Polanski, whom Tarantino has also defended for his misdeed without inhibition in the past.) Plenty of audiences will miss this and many other more or less pregnant references in the film, as every one who isn't a Hollywood and movie aficionado will, and as this review shows, it may be for the better, though it also robs them of the opportunity to really evaluate the film.
SPOILER The following scenes at the Spahn ranch, where Charles Manson's 'family' had found a home under the lonely, unknowing roofs of blind ranch-owner George Spahn (Bruce Dern (Nebraska (2013))), seem to be Tarantino's rejection of Communism (as practiced by the Mansonite hippies), this as experienced by the sure-footed stand-up guy of Pitt's Cliff. A curious side-note it that radically left-wing Lena Dunham (Girls (2012-17)) for some strange reason cameos as one of the hippies.
The film may have been salvaged by the right ending, but the ending is its worst part:
SPOILER Tarantino more or less repeats what he did in Inglourious Basterds (2009), when he had Diane Krueger kill Hitler, Goebbels and a cinema jam-packed with other Nazi scum in its maverick, ahistoric ending. In this case DiCaprio and Pitt kill the three Manson family loons who go to their house instead of the one next door, (where the real massacre took place, the killing of 8½ months pregnant Tate and 4 other people), and do so in a seemingly violent mayhem of glee at the Tarantino's rectifying another historic wrong. Yet this one is somehow "too close to home" and just wrong.
It comes off as an immature and bizarre ending to a detailed and entertaining but lethargic serving from a filmmaker who is way past his own heyday and doesn't know it, or doesn't care.

Related posts:

Quentin Tarantino:  2019 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

2019 in films - according to Film Excess
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2012 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
Django Unchained (2012) - Tarantino's gutsy, colorful 'Southern' 
Inglourious Basterds (2009) - The Movies take revenge on Nazi scum
2007 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I] 
Top 10: Best car chases in movies reviewed by Film Excess to date 
Death Proof (2007) - Tarantino's awesome, rubber-burning Grindhouse homage 
From Dusk till Dawn (1996) - Tarantino, Rodriguez and chums' enjoyable Mexico vampire extravaganza (writer-star)
Desperado (1995) - Rodriguez' second Mexico actioner is a sexy, latino fireball (actor) 
Four Rooms (1995) - Rodriguez, Tarantino & Co. fail with LA hotel anthology comedy (co-director)

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: 95 mil. $
Box office: 244.2 mil. $ and counting
= Box office success (has currently returned 2.57 times its cost)
[Once Upon a Time in Hollywood premiered 21 May (Cannes Film Festival, France, in competition) and runs 161 minutes. It is Tarantino's first major feature made without the involvement of The Weinstein Company, as Tarantino's backed away from them following the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which began rolling in October 2017. He instead made an impressive deal with Sony, which included them distributing and he receiving final cut privilege, a 95 mil. $ budget, 25 % first-dollar gross, - a rare and very lucrative deal for the filmmaker, - as well as getting the film rights after 10 to 20 years. DiCaprio and Pitt were both paid 10 mil. $ for their performances. Shooting took place in California, including Los Angeles, from June - November 2018. A reported, huge 110 mil. $ were spent to market the film; with this and Tarantino's extraordinary deal in mind, estimates say that the film needs to pass 400 mil. $ to start being profitable theatrically. It opened #2, behind holdover hit The Lion King, to a 41 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it spent another 2 weeks in the top 5 (#3-#5) and has grossed 126.6 mil. $ to date. The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets to date are Russia with 15.8 mil. $ and the UK with 15.4 mil. $. The film is listed as a US/UK/Chinese co-production, but it doesn't look like it will get a Chinese release, (it has come out in Hong Kong and Taiwan though.) It has one scheduled market left to open in: Italy on 18 September. The film won a dog award in Cannes and is guaranteed to have been forgotten by Oscar time. But IMDb's users have voted into #232 on the site's Top 250, sitting between Swades (2004) and PK (2014). Tarantino want to make a Star Trek movie as his 10th and last feature,  - but let's see. DiCaprio returns in either gangster drama The Black Hand or crime drama Killers of the Flower Moon; Pitt returns in Ad Astra (2019); Robbie in Bombshell (2019). Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is certified fresh at 85 % with a 7.81/10 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?

The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - Scorsese's obscene suit-and-tie criminal epic is as entertaining as it is morally dubious

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Leonardo DiCaprio fronting one of the run-amok debaucheries of Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street

Master filmmaker Martin Scorsese's (Taxi Driver (1976)) The Wolf of Wall Street was 'the-talk-of-the-town', when it came out and spurred controversy in December 2013.

The film tells the true story of Jordan Belfort, an ambitious kid with a singular dream about being rich, - super-rich, - who goes to Wall Street and accomplishes his dream by great salesmanship skills and elaborate fraud and money-laundering that finally gets him imprisoned (for a little while) for his crimes.

Wolf's madness of excess and depravity really comes alive a bit into the film, when Howlin' Wolf's Smokestack Lightning plays distorted at an office celebration. The film has been likened to Scorsese's great gangster films (namely Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995)), and these are appropriate comparisons. Paradoxically, people seem more outraged with the thugs of Wolf than they have done with the gangsters. Those guys murdered people. The guys in Wolf 'merely' (mostly) rob more or less gullible people, and many of them rich people. It's still wrong, of course, but if you want a moralist movie, or it provokes you to see drug-taking and hearing and seeing 'fuck', then Scorsese didn't make the film for you. - Wolf isn't for everyone, (and certainly isn't for kids or young teenagers.)
That said, the film is obscene. The amount of expletives is unparalleled, and the behavior is all the more revolting because it is sanctioned by society. Only in the end does Belfort go to jail, and not for that long. His fraudulently acquired wealth and ruthlessness seems to be condoned by society by and large.
The film also doesn't seek to hide the upsetting facts of Belfort's case; instead it pushes them to the forefront, SPOILER as exemplified in its ending, when we are confronted with the fact that Belfort today is free and makes new money for himself by fooling the gullible with get-rich-quick motivational speeches.
Scorsese and screenwriter Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire (2010-13)) are bold here, in confronting us with the reality that our capitalist system sometimes - maybe often - makes filthy rich heroes out of terrible people.
Leonardo DiCaprio (Titanic (1997)) is absolutely amazing as Belfort. He delivers the sales pitches like a first rate orator, keeps the frenzied energy of Belfort the drug addict alive and throws himself head-long into the despicable parts of the man's life as well. He is Oscar nominated for the 4th time as an actor for his job here, and I really think he deserves the award this time.
Jonah Hill (Superbad (2007)) is also nominated for his turn as Belfort's partner in crime Donnie Azoff, and he's really something as well. The film is funny as hell, and it is also described as a black comedy various places, and Hill vouches for a lot of these absurdly funny moments.
Wolf has countless other wonderful performances, from Matthew McConaughey (Mud (2013)) as a brief mentor in the 1st act, to great director Rob Reiner (Stand By Me (1986)) as Belfort's irreverent, temperamental dad 'Mad' Max; Jon Favreau, P.J. Byrne (Horrible Bosses (2011)) as a co-conspirator with a hilarious hairpiece, Joanna Lumley (James and the Giant Peach (1996)) as English aunt Emma and Aussie Margot Robbie (About Time (2013)) as Belfort's wife.
The film is full of crazy scenes, and I liked that it took its time to tell its story; SPOILER the Quaalude- and yacht-wrecking scenes won't be forgotten, but also 'smaller' scenes like FBI agent Denham's first visit to Belfort on his yacht is extremely well-played and -paced. Scorsese/Winter/regular editor Thelma Schoonmaker have incredible command of a scene, - and Wolf has many great ones. Much of the film's portrayal of drug-taking, the mentality of 'functional' drug addicts and the sheer glee they have for drugs simply couldn't have been shown like this if is wasn't because Scorsese used to be one himself: His days as a coke-head seem to have culminated at the time of New York, New York (1977) - some highly productive years for the master.
Ultimately, though, I find that The Wolf of Wall Street takes a hit because its production is morally dubious in itself. It isn't just what we see portrayed that's unclean, it is also the way it was brought up there for us, which has become clear since the release of the film: From the grotesque salary disparity between DiCaprio (at least 10 mil. $) and Hill (60k $), the fact that Belfort earned at least 1 mil. $ from the rights of the film, which was funded by illegally obtained funds from 1MDB, a developmental body under the Malaysian (!) government, - to the fact that the film inevitably idolize the criminal here, simply because he is in the guise of DiCaprio, probably the world's most envied playboy. How these things all came to be like this we may never know, but they do throw a shade of sin over the whole film.

Related posts:

2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]  
2013 in films - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]

Martin Scorsese: The Aviator (2004) - The Grand American Biopic (with DiCaprio)
The Age of Innocense (1993) or, Stayin' IN the pants

Prepare to be outraged and have A LOT of fun! Go see The Wolf of Wall Street right now! It's one of the greatest films in theaters at the moment, and it's a blast. See the trailer here

Budget: 100 mil. $
Box office: 389.6 mil. $ and most of it out of the US, where it opened no. 5
= Big hit

What do you think of Wolf of Wall Street?
Do you agree that there's a lot of bullshit surrounding this film, and that it's really a great film?
Why/why not?